[Aimmath-developers] setting the seed for students

[Gustav W D. <gw...@yo...>]

Here at York we need to be able to set the seed for a student's quiz rather
than having it be determined at random. Now in principle this should be no
problem because AiM knows about the optional parameter "Seed". We have no
problem setting that parameter to what we want. This is used to set the seed
in aim/DoQuiz provided UseRecordedSeed=false and UseSeedParameter=true.
Unfortunately these are set to the opposite values in aim/MakeQuizContext.
So just setting the seed parameter won't work.

The only way I can think of to allow us to set the seed involves a change in
the AiM code. My proposal is to introduce yet another optional parameter
called "SetSeed" which, if set to true, is used in aim/MakeQuizContext to
overrule the default settings for UseRecordedSeed and UseSeedParameter.

Are there any objections to this or is there a different way?

You may be interested to know why we need to set the seed. In York we had
the habit of handing out the problem sheets in the lectures. This is
convenient for the students because it saves them having to log in to the
computer just to print out a problem sheet. We want to continue this habit
even after the introduction of AiM (to not antagonize the student
unnecessarily). So we will print out the right number of AiM produced
problem sheets beforehand and these are distributed in the lecture. However
the only practical way to hand them out is randomly. So when the student
then goes to the computer to input his answers he is asked to input a number
that is printed on the sheet. This number is then used by the system to find
the seed that was used to produce that particular problem sheet. We then
need to pass that seed on to AiM, which brings me back to the beginning of
this message.

Gustav